Hitch-Hiking Made Cool

I've been doing the same kind of posts for a while now so time for a brief intermission and change in style. I only recently read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and thought I'd recommend it here to all you nice followers (I'm nearly up to the target of 20 in my life-list :)).

So anyway, I'd heard a lot about Douglas Adams (the author for those who don't know the books) and the book but never got round to reading it. After all the rave reviews I decided to give it a go, especially seeing as it came with a DIY cover that you could put stickers on. Stickers are always a great addition!

I was kind of set up to be disappointed but I really enjoyed it, so much so that I rifled through it in a day (always a sign of a great book). It's just so ridiculously but intelligently stupid. With some of the ideas in the book it should be damn awful but something about the way Adams writes makes it very funny and it all goes together very cleverly. It makes you think quite deeply in several places as well. Writing a stupid quote that actually makes you think deeply is one of the best and hardest things an author can achieve in my opinion and this is full of them.

Here's the kind of thing I mean, though I could pick from dozens:

"Man had always assumed he was more intelligent than dolphins because he'd achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins had always assumed they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

It's that kind of thing which looks so ridiculous at first but then makes you think 'Maybe there's a point in there that we don't take enough time to enjoy the things we make because we're too obsessed with having the next and latest trend' which makes this book great. This just happened to be the one I remembered, there are plenty of other, and possibly better, examples in the book. I can certainly see why this book has such a massive cult following.

Definitely worth a read, unless you're unfortunate enough to be someone who takes life too seriously all the time, in which case I assure you that it will be the worst thing you've ever laid eyes upon.